Obama: The first meme president

President Obama’s first term in office coincided with the growth of online memes — Photoshopped images and jokes that are passed around the Internet. Here’s a history of the first meme president.

Storified by Digital First Media · Wed, Oct 24 2012 02:08:42

Roosevelt had the radio. Kennedy had television. Barack Obama, as it turned out, had memes.

The four years that Obama has served in the White House coincided with an explosion in Internet memes — Photoshopped images that are passed around via email, blogs, Twitter and Facebook and popularized on sites such as Reddit and Tumblr.

Though they’re usually playful, memes can tell us a lot about what people really think about the president. They’ve tracked the hopes projected on him, the difficulties he’s faced in office and the fears of his opponents. And though they are generated and sustained by grassroots Internet users, Obama has played a key role in popularizing many of them.

Here’s a history of the first meme president, as told through seven major memes: the hope poster, Superman, the teleprompter, Spock, the Joker, the Jedi knight and “not bad.”

The hope poster

After eight years of President George W. Bush, liberals were ready for a change. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Obama was still relatively new to the national stage and served as a blank slate to project their hopes.

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(AP Photo/Mannie Garcia)

A freelancer for The Associated Press took this portrait of then-Sen. Obama at the National Press Club on April 27, 2006. Obama was participating in a discussion about African issues.

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Illustrator Shephard Fairey, most widely known for street graphics depicting the wrestler Andre the Giant, adapted the photo into a poster promoting the Obama campaign in 2008. The original version said “progress” at the bottom, but the Obama campaign asked that it be changed to “hope.” The poster quickly became one of the most popular graphics in American political history…

The media picked up on the meme too, with Mad Magazine creating this parody featuring Alfred E. Neuman…

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(AP Photo/TIME)

…and Time magazine hiring Fairey to create a variation on the image for its Dec. 29, 2008, cover naming President-elect Obama “Person of the Year.”

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The meme resurfaced during Obama’s re-election as a way for conservatives to jab the president over his handling of the economy. The high hopes it once conjured could now be contrasted with the president’s actual record in office.

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During his speech at the Republican National Convention, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan referenced the poster to conjure up an image of unemployed college graduates still living with their parents.

Obama as Superman

Around the same time as the Hope poster, many liberals began portraying Obama as Superman, another reflection of the almost impossibly high hopes they had.

The meme stuck in part because it fit Obama’s life story. Superman’s father was from Krypton, but he was raised by a family from Kansas. Obama’s father was from Kenya, but he was raised in part by his grandparents from Kansas. Superman lives in Metropolis; Obama, in Chicago. And both have a certain mild-mannered earnestness about them.

Barack Obama with Superman.jpgWikipedia

(Wikipedia/U.S. Senate office of Sen. Barack Obama)

While still a senator, Obama visited downtown Metropolis, Ill., known as the home of Superman, and posed for this photo after a town-hall meeting. The image was posted on his official Senate website.

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(AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

When Obama began running for president, the Obama-as-Superman meme took hold. Here, a child waiting to hear Obama speak at a Jan. 9, 2008, event in New Jersey, pins a “Superbama” button on his shirt.

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The Superman meme was then added to an existing meme, derived from fans of “Star Trek,” to spoof the motivational posters often hung in offices and schools. In the original version of the meme, Capt. James T. Kirk is boasting about how awesome he is. The Obama version uses the third person to soften the implication of arrogance.

Obama: Born On Kryptonoliverwillis

Obama even referenced the meme, joking at an Oct. 17, 2008, charity dinner in New York that he was “born on Krypton.”

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Comic book artist Alex Ross took the meme more seriously, creating a print of Obama that was also available as a T-shirt. Obama was photographed on Oct. 31, 2008, holding one of the shirts.

He’s Barack ObamaJibJab

The animators at JibJab created a video of Obama as a superhero that played at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in June of 2009. It’s been viewed more than four million times on YouTube.

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Surprisingly, in the most famous superhero meme of Obama’s term — an altered version of the Situation Room photograph of White House staff watching the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden — the president is portrayed as Captain America, while Air Force Brig. Gen. Marshall Webb is Superman. This may be simply because Webb is in charge of the meeting or it may reflect a more down-to-Earth view of Obama, such as it is.

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Obama even made an appearance in Superman comics, helping resolve a political controversy that erupted when the writers decided to have the Man of Steel renounce his U.S. citizenship. (The point was supposed to be that he is a citizen of the world, but conservative pundits called it unpatriotic.) Two weeks later, in a somewhat contrived plot move, the president — clearly meant to be understood as Obama — was unable to reach any other superhero and called on Superman to save the Earth.

Stop Waiting for SupermanTimothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West. Tags: Hope and audacity hung in the winter air those early months of t…

As with the Hope poster, the meme may have actually hurt Obama by raising expectations too high, as more than one pundit has argued.

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(AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo)

Still, among his hard-core supporters, the Superman meme is still running strong. Here, a group of Puerto Ricans mark the president’s one-day trip to the island on June 14, 2011, with posters.

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(AP Photo/Steve Helber)

And, here, a group of volunteers at an Obama campaign call center in Richmond, Va., are watched over by an Obama-Superman cardboard cutout in June of 2012.

The teleprompter

Not all memes were created by Obama supporters. Conservatives seized on his use of the teleprompter, a staple of presidential politics since Eisenhower but one that Obama used far more extensively than his predecessors.

As with the other memes, the teleprompter was tied to one of Obama’s core characteristics: his tendency to give long, carefully worded speeches. For conservatives, it became a way of arguing Obama wasn’t as smart as his supporters believed.

In its harsher forms, it was used to argue that Obama was just reading someone else’s words — a variant of the conspiracy theory that he didn’t write his own books.

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(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Because Obama’s use of teleprompters came in highly public settings, it left a long visual trail for meme-generators to work with.

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It also appears to have been spread by viral email, a form of social media often overlooked. Here, photos of a speech Obama gave at an elementary school were used out of context to falsely assert that he needed a teleprompter just to chat with a group of sixth graders. “And they made fun of Bush’s communication skills,” said one email.

Obama as Spock

During his first year in office, another meme started to take hold: Obama as Mr. Spock, the first officer on “Star Trek.”

The comparison was supposed to be about Obama’s technocratic, emotionless approach to public policy, but it also struck a chord because of his mixed-race background. As any “Star Trek” fan knows, Spock’s mother is human, while his father is from the planet Vulcan. Both also have big ears, a minor comparison that nonetheless plays a big role in any graphic mashups.

Unlike “Superman,” this meme was created more by the political and media class, which paid more attention to his governing style. It was also spurred by the release of a “Star Trek” reboot on May 8, 2009.

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The meme may have started with Spock himself. Leonard Nimoy, who played the character on the original TV series, met Obama at a fund-raiser and later praised his “measured and stable” personality in an October 2008 piece.

But the meme didn’t really take off until a few months into Obama’s term. In a story published May 7, 2009, the day before the movie opened, a piece in Salon argued that it was “quite logical” to see Obama as Spock-like.

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As with the Superman meme, Obama pushed it along too. In an interview published May 15, he told Newsweek that he liked the new movie and even made the Vulcan salute with his hand.

Still, it wasn’t always a positive metaphor. In June of 2009, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper referred to Obama’s “Spock-like language” in a question about the health care. The president responded by asking, jokingly, “was the reference to Spock, is that a crack on my ears?” But the wording contained a subtle dig at Obama’s bloodless way of selling his health care plan.

Still, people had fun with it from time to time. The Onion played with the comparison with a news story headlined “Obama addresses nation still wearing Spock ears” — more a joke about Obama’s geeky interests.

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By December 2011, Obama was rejecting the comparison, telling ABC’s Barbara Walters that the biggest misconception is that he is “detached, or Spock-like, or very analytical.”

Obama as the Joker

Pop culture is closely tied to memes because it ensures that a large number of people will understand the reference. But not every comparison makes sense.

An interesting example of this came when posters comparing Obama to the Joker — the villain of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight” as played by Heath Ledger — began cropping up in 2009. The Joker was a violent anarchist, a terrorist who killed for the pleasure of it, and in look, mannerisms and attitude couldn’t be further from the president of the United States.

But the meme was easy to understand visually and for some Obama critics, that was good enough.

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The movie featured a visually arresting version of the Joker’s makeup that was all but guaranteed to be mimicked widely.

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The first known use of the graphic came at a November 2008 rally at Florida State University featuring Joe Biden. Members of the College Republicans used a Hope poster as the base image. “We wanted to get the attention of a college audience, so we used a pop culture reference,” they explained.

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In January of 2009, a bored college student experimenting with Photoshop “Jokerized” a Time magazine cover of Obama and uploaded the image to the photo-sharing site Flickr.

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(AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Tom Benitez)

An anonymous activist downloaded the photo, removed the Time magazine references and added the word “Socialism” beneath, then began posting copies around Los Angeles. (Above, a modified version seen in Florida.) The first posters were seen in April, but the meme got a boost in August when the head of an L.A. urban policy group said the imagery was mean-spirited and dangerous.

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(AP Photo/Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bob Brown)

The meme spread around the country. Above, a strip club in Richmond, Va., posted a giant mural of it, sparking protests from the local NAACP.

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The Joker effect became the flip side to the Hope poster effect — a quick visual shorthand that could be applied to almost any photo, as with this image of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)

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But the 2012 shootings at the premiere of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colo., probably permanently tainted a meme that was already on the borderline of good taste.

Obama as Jedi

Not all memes started with Obama. People have been using “Star Wars” as a short-hand for politics since Ronald Reagan nicknamed a proposed missile-defense system after the movie and called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.”

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Many applied the same metaphor to the 2008 elections, here portraying Obama as a Jedi knight and Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, as Emperor Palpatine.

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But Obama’s use of a toy lightsaber at a September 2009 White House event promoting Chicago’s bid to host the Olympics gave new life to the meme.

There was even an Obama as Jedi action figure for sale. (Purple was a popular choice for Obama’s lightsaber. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also the color of the lightsaber used by Samuel L. Jackson’s character in the prequels.)

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Of course, not every “Star Wars” reference was positive.

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(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

But Obama’s geeky interests seemed to encourage the meme. Here, he buys a “Star Wars” pop-up book in March of 2010 for then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ son.

The comic strip generated a number of remixes on other sites and the phrase “not bad” eventually became associated with the “sturgeon face” meme. Unlike other Obama memes, though, this one stayed almost entirely within Internet culture.

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Once again, Obama gave the meme a push when he ended a Q&A with Reddit users in August of 2012 with the words “NOT BAD!”

The next meme president

As a national political figure, the nation’s first black president and a fan of comic books and science fiction serving at a time when memes came of age on the Internet, it was perhaps inevitable that Obama would have his image Photoshopped into familiar movie characters and turned into goofy inside jokes.

But time and time again, Obama has shown a knack for turning memes to his advantage. Whether it was his campaign tweaking the design of the Hope poster or him posing in front of a Superman statue, flashing the Vulcan salute or playing with a lightsaber on the White House lawn, Obama helped nudge favorable memes along. Or at the least, as with “Not bad,” he acknowledged them.

Obama also faced the negative side of memes. Comparisons to Spock were something of a backhanded compliment, implying that he lacked an emotional touch, while teleprompter jokes hurt his intellectual image.

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On the political front, protests against his policies coalesced into the “tea party” — a meme that became a movement.

Conservative Activist Forwards Racist Pic Showing Obama As Witch DoctorThe election of our first black president has brought with it a strange proliferation of online racism among conservatives. And we’ve got…

Some memes used racist imagery…

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…or offensive comparisons to Hitler…

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…or attempted to link Obama with Marxism, socialism and communism, such as this parody of a popular Che Guevara poster.

But the memes that were most popular were the ones that rang true with the largest number of people. The Hope poster, Superman and Jedi knight memes showed the high hopes that Obama supporters felt in 2008. The Spock references and teleprompter jokes showed the trouble he had connecting once in office.

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Memes reinforced Obama’s successes when they were straightforward, such as the death of bin Laden…

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…or the Supreme Court’s finding that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. But you’ll search in vain for memes which supported the bill when it was being passed or memes supporting the stimulus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or Obama’s foreign policy.

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Not every meme had a deeper meaning. Sometimes people on the Internet just had fun with a photo where Obama appeared to be holding the sun…